WANDERING WOMB | Cassandra Myers
WANDERING WOMB
“It was believed by Hippocrates that a woman's womb, without ‘normal’ sexual activity, would dislodge and wander, to rest on the brain, resulting in hysteria”
They call us Nomads.
Outcasts.
Barely Human.
An Animal Within An Animal.
Cavernous.
Carnivorous.
Wet and Writhing.
Womanhood Gone Wild.
Went For a Walk in The Woods.
And Never Came Back.
I am the wolf that swallowed the woman in me.
And now I salivate at women in red.
Stealing the wives of good men.
Me, the forced wives of all men.
Setting my own skirts on fire.
Sewing suits by candlelight.
Crime of cross-dressing
Of pelvic mania
My desire - an upside down cross.
My gender - off its leash
Running with the boys -
Mudborn. Dirt by nature.
I dig my soles into masculinity’s hard earth
and escape in my father’s footsteps.
Only to be caught by my body's red ritual
Sniffed out by its shedding skin
Cut me open.
Find nothing childlike.
Only my gender licking its wounds.
Force twisted pleasure
with gloved hands.
Phallic instruments.
Murderous texts.
Pathologize me and make me pay
for your services. For your pills and
professional opinion on
my body, your dissertation.
Make a career out of my blood.
Your doctoral thesis wins
a nobel prize for discovering
what I’ve known all along.
Columbusing my red sea.
Coax the femme out of me with smelling salts.
Smoke the queer out with ghost peppers.
Bind me to the stake and watch
my innards flee north.
“It was believed in the third stage of hysteria, patients grew violent. Patients grew violent. Known to attack men and dogs”
Or...
known to attack men
as dogs.
In the light of the harvest
moon. Our lovers dump blood
from their emptying cavities
then slaughter the master’s favourite
hunting dog and
we rise.
Haunches first.
Silver bulletproof beasts.
Children of the moon.
Come to steal the morning.
Take back the night.
We do not wander.
We hunt.
We are coming for your belly.
To slice a crescent moon with my canines.
An artful C-Section.
Vengeful disembowelment.
We give the orders now doctor.
Our first command is:
Run.
Cassandra Myers (they/she), a queer, non-binary, brown, mad, survivor, writes through her threaded intersections with a focus on detangling. The Canadian Festival of Spoken Word Champion 2019 and CUPSI 2018 Best Poet, Cassandra has been performing within spoken word and slam poetry spaces for over six years. A MSW candidate at York University, Cassandra is applying narrative therapeutic practises within their work as a social service provider and an arts activist.
